...if it is ridiculous to suggest that there is no connection at all between Islamist ideology and Islamist terror, it is also ridiculous to suggest that were was no connection between the alarmist view of the Islamicization of Europe which these writers spread and what Breivik understood himself to be doing. “No ‘ideology’ here”? You bet there was. A significant part of Breivik’s manifesto is a restatement — often by internet copy-and-paste quotation — of precisely their horror story of Europe as ‘Eurabia’: so weakened by the poison of multiculturalism, and other leftist diseases, that it submits without a fight to a condition of dhimmitude under Muslim supremacy...

What, then, should be done about such inflammatory words? One answer, quite popular in parts of the European Left, is, “Ban them!”...

[But] this is quite the wrong way to go. It will not stop these thoughts, just drive them underground, where they fester and become more poisonous. It will chill legitimate debate about important issues: immigration, the nature of Islam, historical facts. It will bring to court fantasists like Samina Malik, a 23-year old shop assistant prosecuted in Britain for writing bad verse glorifying jihadi martyrdom and murder, but not the real men of violence.

Direct incitement to violence should everywhere and always be met with the full rigour of the law. The ideological texts that fed Breivik’s madness did not, so far as I can see, cross that line. Allowing the expression of the crusader fantasies of extreme Islamists and anti-Islamists alike is the price we pay for free speech in an open society.

“Freedom of expression protects not merely ideas that are accepted but those that offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of the pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no democratic society.”

Though Sorabjee was writing about calls to ban Aarakshan, the principle is the same.